The Tiki-Z Special Edition is the latest custom PC from boutique vendor Falcon Northwest. This high-end enthusiast system, which starts at $5,614 manages to pack a dual GPU graphics card, liquid cooled CPU, 600W power supply, and up to 6TB of storage into a stylish micro tower that measures a mere 4” wide and 13” tall.

Falcon Northwest has taken the original Tiki chassis and made several notable tweaks to accommodate NVIDIA’s latest dual GPU card: the GeForce GTX TITAN Z which we reviewed here. The case has a custom (partial) side window that shows off the graphics card. This window can be green glass or smoke tinted acrylic with customizable laser cut venting. A ducted intake feeds cool air to the graphics card and vents at the rear and front of the case exhaust hot air. The exterior of the case can be painted in any single color of automobile paint for free or with a fully customized paint scheme with artwork at an additional cost.

In addition to the Titan Z with its 5,760 CUDA cores, 12GB of memory, and 8.1 TFLOPS of peak compute power, Falcon Northwest has packed a modular small form factor 600W PSU from SilverStone, an ASUS Z97I Plus motherboard, Intel Core i7-4790K “Devil’s Canyon” CPU with liquid cooler, up to 16GB of DDR3 1866MHz memory from G.Skill, and up to 6TB of storage (two 1TB SSDs and one 4TB Western Digital Green hard drive). The i7-4970K comes stock clocked at 4GHz (4.4GHz max turbo), but can be overclocked by Falcon Northwest upon request.

Needless to say, that is a lot of hardware to cram into a PC that can easily sit next to your monitor at your desk or in your living room!

The engineering, artwork, and support of this high end system all come at a price, however. The new Titan Z powered boutique PC starts at $5,614 USD and is available now from Falcon Northwest. To sweeten the deal, for a limited time Falcon Northwest is including a free ASUS PB287Q 4K monitor (3820x2160, 60Hz, 1ms response time, see more specification in our review) with each Tiki-Z purchase.

This system is an impressive feat of engineering and it certainly looks sharp with the artwork, custom side panel, and compact form factor. My only concern from a usability standpoint would be noise from the cooling systems for the GPU, CPU radiator, and PSU. One also has to consider that the Titan Z graphics card by itself is priced at $3,000 which puts the Tiki Z pricing back into the somewhat sane world of boutique PC pricing (heh at about $2,600 for the system minus the GPU). No question, this is not going to be a system for everyone and will even be a niche product within the niche market of those enthusiasts interested in pre-built gaming systems. Even so, if noise levels can be held in check it will make for one powerful little gaming box!

A powerful architecture

In March of this year, NVIDIA announced the GeForce GTX Titan Z at its GPU Technology Conference. It was touted as the world's fastest graphics card with its pair of full GK110 GPUs but it came with an equally stunning price of $2999. NVIDIA claimed it would be available by the end of April for gamers and CUDA developers to purchase but it was pushed back slightly and released at the very end of May, going on sale for the promised price of $2999.

The specifications of GTX Titan Z are damned impressive - 5,760 CUDA cores, 12GB of total graphics memory, 8.1 TFLOPs of peak compute performance. But something happened between the announcement and product release that perhaps NVIDIA hadn't accounted for. AMD's Radeon R9 295X2, a dual-GPU card with full-speed Hawaii chips on-board, was released at $1499. I think it's fair to say that AMD took some chances that NVIDIA was surprised to see them take, including going the route of a self-contained water cooler and blowing past the PCI Express recommended power limits to offer a ~500 watt graphics card. The R9 295X2 was damned fast and I think it caught NVIDIA a bit off-guard.

As a result, the GeForce GTX Titan Z release was a bit quieter than most of us expected. Yes, the Titan Black card was released without sampling the gaming media but that was nearly a mirror of the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, just with a larger frame buffer and the performance of that GPU was well known. For NVIDIA to release a flagship dual-GPU graphics cards, admittedly the most expensive one I have ever seen with the GeForce brand on it, and NOT send out samples, was telling.

NVIDIA is adamant though that the primary target of the Titan Z is not just gamers but the CUDA developer that needs the most performance possible in as small of a space as possible. For that specific user, one that doesn't quite have the income to invest in a lot of Tesla hardware but wants to be able to develop and use CUDA applications with a significant amount of horsepower, the Titan Z fits the bill perfectly.

Still, the company was touting the Titan Z as "offering supercomputer class performance to enthusiast gamers" and telling gamers in launch videos that the Titan Z is the "fastest graphics card ever built" and that it was "built for gamers." So, interest peaked, we decided to review the GeForce GTX Titan Z.

The GeForce GTX TITAN Z Graphics Card

Cost and performance not withstanding, the GeForce GTX Titan Z is an absolutely stunning looking graphics card. The industrial design started with the GeForce GTX 690 (the last dual-GPU card NVIDIA released) and continued with the GTX 780 and Titan family, lives on with the Titan Z.

The all metal finish looks good and stands up to abuse, keeping that PCB straight even with the heft of the heatsink. There is only a single fan on the Titan Z, center mounted, with a large heatsink covering both GPUs on opposite sides. The GeForce logo up top illuminates, as we have seen on all similar designs, which adds a nice touch.

Though delayed by a month, today marks the official release of NVIDIA's Titan Z graphics card, the dual GK110 beast with the $3000 price tag. The massive card was shown for the first time in March at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference and our own Tim Verry was on the grounds to get the information.

The details remain the same:

Specifically, the GTX TITAN Z is a triple slot graphics card that marries two full GK110 (big Kepler) GPUs for a total of 5,760 CUDA cores, 448 TMUs, and 96 ROPs with 12GB of GDDR5 memory on a 384-bit bus (6GB on a 384-bit bus per GPU). For the truly adventurous, it appears possible to SLI two GTX Titan Z cards using the single SLI connector. Display outputs include two DVI, one HDMI, and one DisplayPort connector.

The difference now of course is that all the clock speeds and pricing are official.

A base clock speed of 705 MHz with a Boost rate of 876 MHz places it well behind the individual GPU performance of a GeForce GTX 780 Ti or GTX Titan Black (rated at 889/980 MHz). The memory clock speed remains the same at 7.0 Gbps and you are still getting a massive 6GB of memory per GPU.

Maybe most interesting with the release of the GeForce GTX Titan Z is that NVIDIA seems to have completely fixated on non-DIY consumers with the card. We did not receive a sample of the Titan Z (nor did we get one of the Titan Black) and when I inquired as to why, NVIDIA PR stated that they were "only going to CUDA developers and system builders."

I think it is more than likely that after the release of AMD's Radeon R9 295X2 dual GPU graphics card on April 8th, with a price tag of $1500 (half of the Titan Z), the target audience was redirected. NVIDIA already had its eye on the professional markets that weren't willing to dive into the Quadro/Tesla lines (CUDA developers will likely drop $3k at the drop of a hat to get this kind of performance density). But a side benefit of creating the best flagship gaming graphics card on the planet was probably part of the story - and promptly taken away by AMD.

I still believe the Titan Z will be an impressive graphics card to behold both in terms of look and style and in terms of performance. But it would take the BIGGEST NVIDIA fans to be able to pass up buying a pair of Radeon R9 295X2 cards for a single GeForce GTX Titan Z. At least that is our assumption until we can test one for ourselves.

I'm still working to get my hands on one of these for some testing as I think the ultra high end graphics card coverage we offer is incomplete without it.

Several of NVIDIA's partners are going to be offering the Titan Z including EVGA, ASUS, MSI and Zotac. Maybe the most intersting though is EVGA's water cooled option!

So, what do you think? Anyone lining up for a Titan Z when they show up for sale?

To a crowd of press and developers at their GTC summit, NVIDIA announced the GeForce GTX Titan Z add-in board (AIB). Each of the two, fully unlocked, GK110 GPUs would each have access to 6GB of GDDR5 memory (12GB total). The card was expected to be available on May 8th but has yet to surface. As NVIDIA has yet to comment on the situation, many question whether it ever will.

One concern about the Titan Z was its rated 8 TeraFLOPs of compute performance. This is a fairly sizable reduction from the theoretical maximum of 10.24 TeraFLOPs of two Titan Black processors and even less than two first-generation Titans (9 TeraFLOPs combined). We expected that this is due to reduced clock rates. What we did not expect is for benchmarks to show the GPUs boost way above those advertised levels, and even beyond the advertised boost clocks of the Titan Black and the 780 Ti. The card was seen pushing 1058 MHz in some sections, which leads to a theoretical compute performance of 12.2 TeraFLOPs (6.1 TeraFLOPs per GPU) in single precision. That is a lot.

These benchmarks also show that NVIDIA has a slight lead over AMD's R9 295X2 in many games, except Battlefield 4 and Sleeping Dogs (plus 3DMark and Unigine). Of course, these benchmarks measure the software reported frame rate and frame times and those may or may not be indicative of actual performance. While I would say that the Titan Z appears to have a slight performance lead over the R9 295X2, although a solid argument for an AMD performance win exists, it does so double the cost (at its expected $3000 USD price point). That is not up for debate.

Whichever card is faster, AMD's is half the price and available for purchase rightnow.

So, until NVIDIA says anything, the Titan Z is in limbo. I am sure there exists CUDA developers who await its arrival. Personally, I would just get three Titan Blacks since you are going to need to manually schedule your workloads across multiple processors anyway (or 780 Tis if 32-bit arithmetic is enough precision). That is, of course, unless you cannot physically fit enough GeForce Titan Blacks in your motherboard and, as such, you require two GK110 chips per AIB (but not enough to bother writing a cluster scheduling application).

NVIDIA unveiled the GeForce GTX TITAN Z at the GPU Technology Conference last month, and the cards will be for sale soon from various partners. ASUS will be one of the first AIB partners to offer a reference TITAN-Z.

The ASUS GTX TITAN Z pairs two full GK110-based GPUs with 12GB of GDDR5 memory. The graphics card houses a total of 5,760 CUDA cores, 480 texture manipulation units (TMUs), and 96 ROPs. Each GK110 GPU interfaces with 6GB of GDDR5 memory via a 384-bit bus. ASUS is using reference clockspeeds with this card, which means 705 MHz base and up to 876 MHz GPU Boost for the GPUs and 7.0 GHz for the memory.

For comparison, the dual-GPU TITAN Z is effectively two GTX TITAN Black cards on a single PCB. However, the TITAN Black runs at 889 MHz base and up to 980 MHz GPU Boost. A hybrid water cooling solution may have allowed NVIDIA to maintain the clockspeed advantage, but doing so would compromise the only advantage the TITAN Z has over using two (much cheaper) TITAN Blacks in a workstation or server: card density. A small hit in clockspeed will be a manageable sacrifice for the target market, I believe.

The ASUS GTX TITAN Z has a 375W TDP and is powered by two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors. The new flagship dual GPU NVIDIA card has an MSRP of $3,000 and should be available in early May.